The Tragedy of Heterosexuality: Indecent Proposal (Adrian Lyne, 1993)

I no longer understand straight people. I’m not trying to be cute here: I used to get it. I used to be it, albeit awkwardly. Just a few years ago, I more or less knew the rules and aesthetics that governed heterosexual couples, and how to behave when you were trying to be in one. Now, when I watch movies about heterosexual marriage, I am flabbergasted. None of the norms or values translate. I feel like Florence Pugh in Midsommar, being inducted into these people’s flowery, sunlit, yet strangely violent lifestyle. 

This has been a newsletter about horror movies for six years now. I have admittedly stretched the definition of “horror.” I’ve thrown in a lot of essays about something else. But I’ve stayed committed to this one genre for a very long time, and now, my eye has started to wander. To keep my relationship with horror spicy, I’ve decided to bring in a third. A new genre, one that I can’t see myself committing to long-term, but which is nonetheless exciting. 

From now until the end of June, possibly the end of summer, this will be a newsletter for EROTIC THRILLERS. Giallo di sessualità. Les thrillers erotiques. We will be starting with one of the most ubiquitous erotic thrillers of all time, a movie whose plot managed to worm its way into my brain in 1993, despite the fact that I was eleven years old and completely forbidden to watch it: Indecent Proposal.

As you can see from the spreadsheet, the erotic thriller is a tight, contained, formally rigorous genre. There are a few regular actors and a few regular directors; there are a few standard plots; the second-tier movies in this genre tend to just be unofficial remakes of the A-list ones. An erotic thriller hits a few expected beats, in order, every time, and you hope it hits them well enough to satisfy you. It’s a lot like marriage that way.